Greetings and welcome, my sweet toothsome tidbits. It’s your hairy host, Marko the Werelynx, posting another batch of summer vacation photos to kick off another Friday-flavored open thread.
This week, I’ve got Part II of my visit to an impressive archaeological park in Poland. Part I can be found here.
My personal update this week doesn’t contain any great amount of news. I get to sleep back in my own bed tonight. My Brother-In-Law flew into Prague last night and I guided him through the routine of taking care of his mom, my Fabulous Mother-In-Law. And yeah, last night was pretty rough on him. He didn’t get a lot, if any, sleep. Well, to begin with, he didn’t get in until nearly midnight and then he and I sat up for another hour and a half talking and drinking beer. Then we checked on Fabulous Mother-In-Law and there was a bit of a poop crisis in progress.
Yeah, another half an hour later we were able to get to bed.
For those of us in the family who live near Fabulous Mother-In-Law, the decline in her health due to Alzheimer’s over the last couple of months has been steep, but we’ve had time to adjust to the changes as they came. For Brother-In-Law, who last saw her in the Spring three quarters of a year ago, it’s been a shock.
Well, family pelmeni day is tomorrow and whose mood isn’t improved by copious amounts of pasta?
We’ll be coming together at Fabulous Mother-In-Law’s apartment and sharing a meal. It’ll be a bitter-sweet gathering. Laughter, tears and meat-filled pasta served with beefy bouillon and garlic mustard.
Now, how about a late bronze age fortified town?
The Archaeological Museum in Biskupin
As a reminder, this remarkable museum does have an official website.
After leaving the area of the park where stone age settlements once stood and had been recontructed, we made our way to the end of a peninsula that juts out into Lake Biskupin.
A partial reconstruction of a late bronze age town looms through the trees …
A low-relief model of the town’s long-buildings and the surrounding ramparts
The reconstructed gate and a section of the walls
The spiky structure of the breakwater
Inside one of the long-buildings. A cooking pit and drying herbs. Note the log flooring cleverly used in this marshy environment.
A cast bronze scale model of the settlement with text in a number of languages, including braille.
Here you are, my little friend, here’s some text from a display within a display
Illustrations of the settlement and construction methods
I should probably explain the “Little Friend”thing. Most of the informational panels for these displays had little summaries of the text for younger readers.
You can imagine how difficult the actual dig was at this site. They’d just found some wooden pylons sticking up above the water when the level of the lake had gotten unusually low. Now the whole area had to be walled off and drained. The dense peat and mud cleared off while constantly pumping water out of the holes they were digging. But what they found in the lake bed was remarkably well preserved.
The panel on the dendrological dating methods used to determine the age of the settlement.
Like the floors of the buildings, the streets were also made of wood.
Looking down a street with the main gate in the background.
A bit higher angle from the ramparts
O’er the ramparts we watched … the lake.
From up there I’d noticed another room I’d missed (there were a lot of them).
I might have missed the Common Swifts on the roof if I hadn’t gone back down on of the streets before leaving.
Outside the wall and heading to yet another section of this massive museum.
Next week there’ll be horses and perhaps a couple of lions as my series of diaries from Poland reaches its conclusion with Part III of our visit to the Archaeological Museum in Biskupin.
Thanks for stopping by.
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